Last week as floodwaters quickly began threatening the town of Salina, Steve LeGoff and his wife, Michelle Grainger, sought higher ground at a neighbor's house.

They thought they'd be safe there.

But a wall of water was heading their way, and the ground behind the house where they were staying was becoming so saturated it was ready to slide.

The small town of Salina -- at the junction of Fourmile Canyon and Gold Run Road -- was hit hard by the devastating 100-year flood.

"We were only asleep for about a half-hour when the mudslide happened," Grainger said.

A sheet of water, mud and sediment filled the house, slamming Grainger into the wall. She was trapped against the door, with water quickly rising up to her chest.

"It was chaos," she said. "Everyone was screaming."

Wading around in the 55-degree water, barefoot, in the pitch black with the roar of the fast-moving water, LeGoff tried to locate his wife.

"When something you love is going to be taken away from you, you find a way to save it. You don't stop," he said. "I thought in 30 seconds I would lose everything I had -- my wife, my two dogs, the two cats. I was on my way to losing everything."

Once LeGoff reached his wife, he realized she was trapped.

"I remember looking at Michelle when she said, 'Steve, I don't want to die this way.' I looked back and said, 'You are not going to die this way.'"

He tried to smash windows, but when that didn't work he kicked out the door behind his wife.

"That's when the water had a place to escape, and the water went down," LeGoff said.

Their dog was buried in the mud, but the couple saved her by tugging her out of the mud, removing mud from her mouth and resuscitating her, they said.

Michelle Grainger smiles with her husband, Steve LeGoff, on Thursday on Gold Run Road in Salina. The couple barely survived a mudslide caused by last week's flooding.
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JEREMY PAPASSO
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"All I could think to do is to breathe into her mouth, so I start blowing and screaming at her," Grainger said.

LeGoff said he and a friend garnered the strength to lift three microwave-sized boulders off of Grainger. She was finally freed.

Elsewhere in the house, their neighbor was trapped in a bedroom. Grainger went to get help from others to dig him out of the mud.

The families escaped to another house in town on higher ground and spent the rest of the night there. All of their pets were accounted for, including their cat, which had suffered a broken leg.

In two separate rescue missions, the two families and their pets were all airlifted out by a Black Hawk helicopter. Grainger had suffered a compression fracture in her back and two broken ribs.

"It's unbelievable that we all got out," LeGroff said.

Grainger and LeGoff have no plans to move out of the Fourmile Canyon area.

"We were hit really bad by this flood, but we are going to find a way. There has to be a way," Grainger said. "Salina is our family; we have lived here for 22 years. We can't imagine living anywhere else."

'We can't rebuild on that land'

While evacuating their Salina home, Sean and Meg McCroskey made an unspoken pact to maintain a facade of normalcy during the flooding and everything that followed to protect their two sons, Greyson, 4, and Carter, 3.

Sean McCroskey pulls his wife's jacket out of the debris in the river on Thursday in front of their destroyed home on Gold Run Road in Boulder County.
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JEREMY PAPASSO
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When they learned that their 2,200-square-foot home had been reduced to rubble at the breakfast table of a friend they were staying with, they just looked at each other, trying not to let the shock and sadness show on their faces.

They each hiked down alone to the pile of rubble that was their home for a private moment of grieving, but since then, like many Boulder County families affected by the flood, they've been in survival and recovery mode.

"Sometimes I feel like I go through the grieving process quickly," said Meg McCroskey, 36. "I bawled and I sobbed, but you have two little guys, you gotta keep it together. You have to be optimistic. You have to move on."

The McCroskeys' house is a total loss. One car is stranded near their home with no way to drive it down out of the mountains. They have no flood insurance. They expect to get help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the maximum amount of aid they were told they could receive from FEMA is roughly $32,000, Meg McCroskey said.

With help and donations from friends and strangers through an online fundraising site, though, the McCroskeys say they'll find a way to get back to normal.

Sean McCroskey, who works for data storage provider NetApp, began communicating with his boss Clint Owens shortly after they evacuated.

Owens, who lives in Portland, Ore., set up a fundraising page through the website GoFundMe.com, and within a week, friends, neighbors and complete strangers from around the world had amassed tens of thousands of dollars for the McCroskeys. As of Friday night, they had raised more than $81,000.

Owens said it's been "amazing to watch the giving nature of people."

The money and well wishes will make life a little easier in the coming months and years as they attempt to find "normal" again, Sean McCroskey said.

"I'm not unlike anybody else in this world," he said. "I work hard and I've worked hard for a long time to have what I had, and just to have that be taken away from you in an instant, it's hard. It's just hard."

Certain areas near their home have washed out every time it's rained since the Fourmile Fire of 2010, and the evening of Sept. 11, the McCroskey family thought the area near their home might flood. They moved their truck and boat out of that washout zone and went to bed, not thinking much of the heavy rain that kept falling in Boulder County.

When they woke up the next morning, their driveway culvert had washed out, and Gold Run Creek -- normally no wider than a sidewalk -- was rushing furiously over top of their driveway. One of their cars was hanging precariously off a newly formed cliff by its two front tires. The rushing waters kept eroding away the McCroskeys' land.

At about 5 p.m. Sept. 12, the creek caught hold of the other side of the house and started eating away at the land under their home.

Sean and Meg McCroskey packed up some food and clothing in their two heavy-duty backpacking packs and grabbed the cat, Franklin, and dog, Gretta. The young family began hiking uphill to their friend Pete Brady's house, with Greyson and Carter splashing in puddles along the way.

While they hiked, Franklin, a jet-black, 1-year-old kitten, clawed his way out of Meg McCroskey's arms.

"I couldn't hold him anymore. Greyson was like, 'Mommy, we're going to have to let him go. We're going to have to leave him.'"

They spent the night with Brady and in the morning called a neighbor across the street, who informed the McCroskeys that their two-story, grey-blue home had collapsed.

Later, when Sean McCroskey hiked down to their home, he called for the skinny black cat and found him, miraculously unharmed, in a patch of sun near the house.

"I walked up to him, and his motor starts purring," Sean McCroskey, 42, said. "I sit down and hang out with him for a second. He sits on my lap. I'm talking to him about the night he had and the night we had."

He carried Franklin, kicking and yowling, back to Brady's house. On the afternoon of Sept. 13, they hiked to the top of Melvina Hill Road and waited almost three hours for the weather to clear so that a National Guard helicopter could land.

Sean McCroskey hiked the five miles down to Boulder with their dog while Meg McCroskey, the two boys and the cat were airlifted out of the mountains.

Friends in Superior took the McCroskeys in that night.

When Sean McCrosky woke up Sept. 14, the full weight of his family's situation fell on him. Everyone -- including the cat and dog -- was safe. He sobbed alone in his temporary room.

"It was the release of dealing with the whole fiasco," he said. "To be somewhere where you don't have to worry about, 'Are we safe? Is there power, water? Is my son going to have something to eat?'"

The McCroskeys will soon move into a long-term hotel paid for by Sean McCroskey's company. They have no longer-term housing plans: They don't want to leave their mountain community, but they're not sure they can afford to rebuild in Salina.

The McCroskeys moved to that blue house with white trim in June 2010, and on Labor Day that year, they were evacuated during the Fourmile Fire. Six weeks later, they moved back home, settled in with their new charred landscape and became part of the close-knit community that is Salina.

"There's not much we can do," Meg McCroskey said. "We can't rebuild on that land. We'd have to build it all back up and start over, and I'm not sure we'd be able to afford that."

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